``The police couldn't put you into their polarization structure. They know how to deal with real criminals, but somebody who puts eggplants on sticks - you're making a mockery of their social order, and that's worse than what most criminals are capable of doing.''

- Andrea Juno

Culture jamming tactics can be put to use to further a political or activist agenda.

I'll give the gold medal to the anonymous poet who managed to hide the phrase ``Li Peng Step Down!'' in the characters of a patriotic poem in the official Chinese Communist Party newspaper.

A silver to the Barbie Liberation Organization for switching the voice-generating units in talking Barbie dolls with the ones in talking G.I. Joe dolls and returning the dolls post-surgically to the toy store. The two dolls then made strides against the tyranny of gender roles, Barbie yelling ``Vengeance is mine'' while Joe offered: ``Let's go shopping!''

And a bronze to the Veterans of Future Wars - founded at Princeton University in 1936 to parody the bottom-line patriotism of organized veterans groups. Eventually the group would claim 50,000 members in chapters on hundreds of campuses:

``Their first manifesto in the Princetonian argued that sooner or later there would be another war and that it would only be an act of justice for Congress to grant a $1000 cash bonus to all men between the ages of 18 and 36. Legally the bonus would be payable in 1965, but since Congress seemed bent on paying bonuses before they were due, the actual payment date should be June 1936, with, of course, an additional 3 percent annual interest compounded back from 1965 to 1936. In this way the future veterans would receive their benefits while all were still alive to enjoy them. A national salute was adopted, a modified version of the then famous Fascist greeting: an arm held straight out in the direction of Washington, the palm turned up receptively.''

When orwellian antihero John Poindexter was assigned to head up the United States government's Total Information Awareness project, an unorganized group of pranksters decided to give Admiral Poindexter a taste of what total information awareness feels like from the other side.

They found his home phone number and address, and posted this information - along with a link to a satellite photo of his house - far and wide on the internet.

It all started when Matt Smith, a columnist for the SF Weekly, wrote an article about Poindexter's new intelligence bureau, that read, in part:

...I dialed John and Linda Poindexter's number -- (301) 424-6613 -- at their home at 10 Barrington Fare in Rockville, Md... Why... is their $269,700 Rockville, Md., house covered with artificial siding, according to Maryland tax records? Shouldn't a Reagan conspirator be able to afford repainting every seven years? Is the Donald Douglas Poindexter listed in Maryland sex-offender records any relation to the good admiral? What do Tom Maxwell, at 8 Barrington Fare, and James Galvin, at 12 Barrington Fare, think of their spooky neighbor? ...For those of you revolutionaries with private investigator friends, ask for even more sensitive information on Reagan's former national security adviser. I'd be glad to publish anything readers can convincingly claim to have obtained legally.

Visit the John Poindexter Awareness Office for more Information.

An ongoing guerrilla hack in search of volunteers is the project to interrupt pathological, media-simulated social interaction. Care to sign up?

When Canadian potheads learned that drug-sniffing dogs would be prowling about on Vancouver ferries, they took action. They created an alcohol solution of the essence of marijuana, and during events they called ``spray days'' sprayed the solution all over the ferry boats to confuse the dogs.

In Elm Grove, Wisconsin, teenagers who felt unfairly targeted by cops on the prowl for underage drinkers set up a sting of their own. They had a party at which they gathered to drink root beer. When the cops came and raided the party, the teenagers sued - saying that the police had violated their rights when they stormed the property without either a warrant or reasonable suspicion that a crime was being committed. A federal judge agreed!

``Voting is not only useless, it actually undermines genuine democracy by legitimizing an inherently undemocratic process. During this election we are encouraging people to eat their ballots,'' say the folks at The Edible Ballot Society. Criminally charged with violations of Canada's elections laws, which prohibit the mutilation (and presumably the mastication) of ballots, members of the group vowed to eat their subpoenas.

Jim Bell invented an interesting theoretical protocol by which a group of people could conspire, more-or-less out in the open, to put out a contract on the life of the President of the United States or some other such figure, and get away with it.

Oh boy did They come down hard on him for that. Him and anyone else they could find. Maybe he's on to something?

In 2001, all 273 members of South Korea's parliament received packages in the mail containing ``human excrement.'' One wit remarked that at least in South Korea, when it comes to politics, people still give a shit.

There's a hoax doing the rounds that claims that the United States Internal Revenue Service is giving tax refunds to African-Americans in a program of reparations for the institution of slavery in America. It's not true. But that's not really accurate, either, since in 2000 and 2001, the IRS mistakenly paid out over thirty million dollars to people claiming this hoax tax credit!

The ad agency is calling it a ``mixup'' but I suspect that someone was trying to be sly. The agency put up a billboard along I-485 in North Carolina that read ``Gore 2000'' but showed a picture of Al Gore's opponent in the ``election,'' Bush II.

You just can't trust campaign literature these days.

Slobodan Milosevic found his control of Serbian government challenged by a group of young, creative, theatrical protesters who go by the name Otpor. Take a look at their accomplishments - they succeeded!

In Peru, The Civil Society Collective used street theater and provocative props in their protest against Fujimori's government. (And they won their battle, too).

City plans for refurbishing the waterfront area of South Boston called for half of the area to remain as ``open space.'' But by the time politicians and developers got through with the paperwork, ``open space'' was redefined to include sidewalks and roads.

So in the Spring of 2001, Lisa Greenfield and Jennifer Moses organized a group to cover a Boston bridge end-to-end with grass to dramatize their idea of what open space looks like.

The Youth International Party, U.S.A. (Yippies) produced a voter's guide in 1968 that read, in part:

1. Vote. Bring some spare underwear with you, preferably that of the opposite sex, and fling it over the top of the booth while you're voting.
2. Help others vote. Stand outside the polls silently handing out sharpened pencils to voters on their way in. If you feel this is insufficiently militant, hand out kitchen matches...
3. Get out the vote. Volunteer for Election Day precinct work. Cover a precinct for Nixon. Cover the same precinct for Humphrey and Wallace. Once they've signed you up for a precinct, they're counting on you to get out the vote there. You may want to do more than one precinct.

In 1998, the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals offered to open its spacious and well-stocked ``dog apartments'' as temporary housing for the homeless. A Modest Proposal perhaps?

18^th Century classics of the subgenre of literary guerrilla hacks include the satirical essays A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift and Shortest Way with the Dissenters by Daniel Defoe.

Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter-to-the-editor back in 1790 in which he claimed to have found a well-reasoned defense of slavery remarkably similar to a recent speech by Senator Jackson - only this defense was written in 1687 by one Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim to justify the enslavement of white Christians in Algeria.

A somewhat more recent example is the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a politically-motivated guerrilla hack that has been used by governments as diverse as Czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, and Idi Amin's Uganda to whip up antisemitism.

Yet more recently, the Report from Iron Mountain was dreamed up by a pack of leftists during the Cold War as a satire of machiavellian governmental manipulation. It takes the form of a thinktank-analysis of the effect peace would have on the health of the state, and comes down firmly in favor of continual war as good for the country. The report simulated so accurately the voice of authority that anti-government militia types are fond of pointing to it today as evidence of a government conspiracy.

The Italian situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti piled an Iron Mountain of his own in 1975 with his ``The Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy.''

A (wisely) anonymous broadside advocates using simulated assassination to accomplish all of the aims of political assassination without actually killing anyone.

In 1981, the British environmentalist group ``Friends of the Earth'' produced mailing labels addressed to the U.K. Prime Minister that were designed to be attached to discarded soda cans, as a way of promoting government support for recycling.

In 1961, another group protested Soviet nuclear testing by piling hundreds of milk bottles in front of the Soviet embassy in London, each bearing the legend ``Danger: Radioactive.''

A few things I'd like to think were guerrilla hacks include a couple of products sold to police departments. One, a database program called ``Crime Tracker'' eventually ate up the computer records of the police departments that purchased it (the hacker has since vanished). The other is the Quadro QRS 250G, a fancy sounding electromagnetic detective that some departments paid as much as $8,000 for - it turned out to be pretty much a plastic box with an antenna.

Also in this category are the antics of David Bowman, a ``budget analyst'' for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency who analyzed U.S. $6 million out of the budget and into his pockets between 1990 and 1997. David Bowman, synchronistically, is the name of the commander in 2001: A Space Odyssey who has to crawl into the very guts of the out-of-control machinery that controls his life in order to shut it down.

Buffo reports: ``In 1960 a series of demonstrations were held in Japan against the renewal of the Japanese-U.S. security treaty. President Eisenhower was to make a state visit to promote the pact. However, on the night of the 19^th June, 300,000 Sohyo (trade union) members and 40,000 militants of the Zengakuren converged on the Diet (parliament) building in a 'snake-dance.' Then they held a mass urination on the main steps of the building. The Japanese government was obliged to ask Eisenhower to cancel his visit.''

And the Drudge Report brings us the news of a mass-mooning by a thousand protesters outside U.S. President George W. Bush's hotel room at Gothenburg, Sweeden.

In 1967 a group of Chinese soldiers got in the habit of starting their mornings with a mass-mooning of Soviet troops across the border. Their Soviet comrades responded by holding up portraits of Chairman Mao when the mooning began!

The Black Panthers used an interesting tactic to redirect the police to less authoritarian pursuits. The intersection of 55^th and Market in Oakland, California was dangerous, and people were getting killed by the traffic there. Alas, they weren't white people, so the white-dominated government was in no hurry to put up a traffic light. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale of the Panthers came up with a creative traffic calming plan: They would go out with their guns drawn to direct traffic. When the police showed up, responding to complaints of armed negroes in the streets, Newton and Seale would retreat, whereupon the police would take over as traffic-cops.

The U.S. government's response to the Black Panthers could be equally creative. The Federal Bureau of Investigation covertly distributed what was purportedly a Black Panther Coloring Book for children full of illustrations of angry black men and children offing the pigs. This book was then sent to liberal supporters of the Panthers' programs in an attempt to horrify them.

Upset at slum neighborhood conditions in Chicago, a group called The Woodlawn Organization piled dead rats on the steps of City Hall.

John F. Kennedy ran for president of the United States government saying that he would end racial discrimination in federally-assisted housing ``with one stroke of the pen.'' When, years after he was elected, he still hadn't fulfilled his promise, the Congress for Racial Equality sent thousands of bottles of ink to the White House in protest.

Environmentally-minded pranksters in Kingston, Ontario - upset that the government was clearcutting old-growth forests in Temagami - decided that public opinion might be influenced if the trees were being cut down in town where the voters lived. So they created a phony memo from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources explaining that in order to avoid ``an exorbitant municipal tax,'' the government would ``capitalize on the current high market values of oak and maple lumber'' by hacking down ``5,000 trees in city parks and along city streets.'' Naturally, the long-overdue outrage was provoked.

Another way they have of harassing the natives up in The Maple Leaf State is to test military aircraft in low-altitude bombing runs on their land. Again, the Kingston pranksters bring it home, posting official notices alleging that the overflights and bombings will be happening where the white people live!

A similar prank from the Kingston crew was a notice calling for immediate military draft registration that was posted at a war-happy college campus back when the U.S. and its allies were fighting to keep Kuwait safe for monarchy. The Call to Register was designed to sober up some of the rambo-talking (but draft-eligible) men on campus.

Upset at the way extrajudicial state killings were being covered up in Canada, some Kingston residents (hey, if you send me some stuff from your home town, maybe Kingston won't get all the press) made wanted posters for some of the death squad members - and were dragged into court by the government and charged with libel!

People opposed to the military draft by the United States government during the Vietnam War invented a form of protest they called the ``comply-in.'' According to one activist, ``The law... requires registrants to inform the draft boards within ten days of any change in address or status. This means changes in religion, mental attitude and everything else. We want everyone to take this law so seriously that they inform their board of every single change...''

A letter, printed on city letterhead and distributed around town, started by saying ``The Huntington Beach Police Department is again demanding your compliance on the Fourth of July 1998. To deter traditional holiday behavior on our nation's birthday, we will again be forced to suspend certain inalienable rights...'' None too subtle, you say? Well, former Huntington Beach mayor Wes Bannister read all the way to paragraph three before getting the joke.

Some billboard improvements have a political message, like this modification of a military recruitment advertisement, or this hybrid of an anti-drug billboard and a wry commentary on the return of the George Bush political dynasty.

Famous in U.S. revolutionary history is The Boston Tea Party of 1773, in which an American rebel group calling themselves ``The Sons of Liberty'' dressed up in disguise/costume and dumped imported British tea into Boston harbor as a protest against British control of the American economy. There's a first-hand report of the party on-line.

Another bit of colonial performance art worth mention was the elaborate funeral held commemorating the death of Freedom on 1 November 1765, when the British began enforcing the Stamp Act. Upon reaching the graveyard, Liberty was seen to suddenly resurrect, and the rest of the day was spent celebrating the miracle.

Tawana Brawley was the seed that grew into one of the most outrageous racially-based hoaxes we've seen in a while (although certainly not the first nor the worst).

And the campaign to ban dihydrogen monoxide parodies the often scientifically illiterate warnings against frightening-sounding chemicals (and provides ammunition to terrorists, apparently).

Governments live and die by disinformation campaigns, and they're getting pretty good at it. Is The Eremin Letter real, or just capitalist propaganda? When you read about the U.S. government's campaigns against enemies like Fidel Castro, or you ``Remember The Maine'' - or the barbarous Huns - or the Tonkin Gulf incident - or the cocaine found in Manuel Noriega's fridge - or the babies thrown out of incubators by barbaric Iraqi troops - or the prisoners starving in Serbian death camps - or the specific, credible threat to Air Force One on 9/11, you come to understand that there's a method to this madness.

The ever-successful Arm The Homeless advocacy group provides a chance to make fun of society's attitudes towards poor people, as well as the rhetoric of philanthropy and of Second Amendment defenders. ATH is joined by satirical political action committees like Ladies Against Women and Always Causing Legal Unrest.

A nod (and a wink) to Screaming Lord Sutch of Britain's Monster Raving Loony Party.

Many of the games that made TV Nation so fun at times were politically aimed.

And then there are the Yippies, America's political prankster clowns. Two of the more well-known are Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

I tried handing out copies of that old Yippie document The School Stoppers' Textbook to some schoolkids in my town, hoping that it would inspire the inmates of the public schools to acts of rebellion appropriate to their circumstance. I was met by five people with badges who informed me that the First Amendment did not apply to this particular piece of writing. I was held in prison on U.S. $40,000 bail and eventually convicted for (I kid you not) nothing more than handing out leaflets on a public sidewalk. So the people who publish this text on-line at places like here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here are in danger of prosecution if any California student clicks their way to the page.

®^TMark has taken on a number of guerrilla hacking tasks, including making an impressive parody web site of George W. Bush's election campaign...

For other good ideas, check out the Political Hooliganism down under, or a history of dirty tricks in political campaigns.

Those of you in the U.S. will be interested in the Copswatch project. If you've been liberated from television, you may not be aware that the police department has become an arm of the entertainment industry. Camera crews for TV shows like ``Cops'' ride along in police cars and film arrests, car chases and domestic violence - it's the biggest thing since the Lions vs. the Christians. Copswatch keeps an eye on the show, using the incidents broadcast to teach people ``how to protect your privacy and confront illegal police tactics by knowing and invoking your constitutional rights.''

Sometimes, turnabout is the best play. The police in Portland, Oregon were discovered to have been rummaging through people's trash cans to find evidence - without a search warrant. When city politicians and law enforcement officials defended this invasion of privacy as completely legal and appropriate, a local newsweekly turned the tables on 'em. They raided the trash cans of the mayor, the district attorney and the police chief, and then published a detailed analysis of their findings.

A tip of the hat to Luther Blissett of San Luis Obispo, California, who responded to the first Rodney King trial's verdict by plastering official-looking fliers around town announcing that police brutality was now legal policy.

From the bureau of amateur chemical-warfare comes a report of a woman who responded to the mayor's call for a ``zero-tolerance'' drug policy for Elkhart, Indiana city employees by dropping off a tray of pot brownies at the Central Fire Station last Christmas.

I need to do some more research into the whole monkeywrenching and ecotage movement, which isn't exactly ``culture jamming,'' but still deserves a mention.